This is Episode 8, the opening of Arc III — English Liberty — and the first of the series to turn from the question of how to govern without a king to the harder English question of how to bind a king who very much remains on his throne. It is the story of Sir Edward Coke and the idea he did more than any single man to forge: that the law stands above the crown. We trace what the common law actually was — a law its own practitioners claimed no one had made, found rather than

To understand why that sentence was revolutionary, and why the man who spoke it is widely regarded as one of the most important legal minds the English common-law tradition has produced, we have to understand what the common law was, what the Stuart kings claimed, and why the collision between them shaped the constitutional inheritance that the American colonists would one day take up as their own.